My friend has disappeared, part 1

(Names have been changed.)

I met Sam in the fall of 1981.  We had been placed in choir class together, and sat near each other.  He regularly got yelled at for screwing around and talking in class.  Sam invited me to go to his house during lunch one day, and watch a new television channel called MTV.  We sat in his family room eating Doritos as we watched a music video by Pat Benetar with her spiked hair and tight spandex.  Sam and I quickly became friends.  I had a car, he had MTV.

Sam had this little gym in his dimly lit basement, and we spent many hours downstairs, lifting weights, flexing in the mirrors, and listening to music.  On the weekends, be would go to a local club named Beavers, to dance and chase girls.  Sam always had the ability to laugh, and make any situation less serious.  That’s definitely why I liked him so much.  And although Sam and I became good friends, he had some odd behaviors.  His thoughts just seemed to form and come out a little differently than everyone else.  And he had this bad habit.  He told lies constantly.  It would really confuse his friends and family, because he would lie, even when it would have served him better to tell the truth.  Stranger yet, he wouldn’t lie when he probably should have.  Sam didn’t graduate from high school because he skipped too many classes, and I never once saw him do any homework.  Although he lied about why he didn’t graduate, we all knew.

After high school, we both served LDS missions, and then I left for Utah to study psychology, while Sam stayed home to work in construction and other odd jobs.  Two weeks after getting married, my new wife and I rented a tiny studio apartment  with a bedroom barely big enough for a bed and a couch, a shoe-box sized kitchen, and a bathroom.  When we drove home for Christmas break, Sam asked if he could come back to Utah after the holiday.  We must have been crazy, but we said yes, and told him that he could sleep on the couch which was in our bedroom, for a couple weeks until he could get his feet on the ground.  That’s where we ran into problems.  Sam hardly looked for a job.  I’d get so pissed-off at him when I’d come home after a long day, only to find him relaxing on the sofa in his pajamas.  Although my wife and I discussed it, we didn’t have the heart to kick him out, especially since he didn’t know anyone else.  And he was broke.

Don’t get me wrong, we did have some fun times while he lived with us.  My wife had bought me a Little Tots basketball set (about five feet high) which we set-up in our bedroom/living room.  Sam and I spent many hours playing basketball and horsing around wrestling, and feigning slam dunks, much to the displeasure of our neighbor in the apartment downstairs.  I don’t think Marley, our new kitten, or my wife liked us playing indoors either.  One of the most memorable moments of his stay happened a couple weeks after he moved in.

Our apartment had an old, claw-foot bathtub, and I had fashioned a board which would stretch across the tub, to hold my textbooks, so I could have some private time, and study. I had taken some Diet Pepsi (in a two-liter bottle) into to the tub while I read a book on abnormal psychology.  After the bottle was empty, without giving it any thought, I filled it up with the bathwater, put on the lid, and never emptied it.  Imagine my surprise when I came home from work the next day, and found the Pepsi bottle half-filled with red Kool-Aid.  Sam had used the bottle of bathwater to make his Kool-Aid (and remember half was gone).  Ah, the pleasure in a little retribution! Sam ended up staying with us for over two months, until he finally found a job at Jiffy Lube as a grease-monkey changing oil, and finally got his own apartment.

After graduating, my wife and I moved back to Washington, and not long after, Sam moved back as well. This is when we first started noticing him acting strange (stranger than normal anyway).  Sometimes he would come over a few times a week, and then he’d vanish. We wouldn’t hear from him for months. Eventually, I would piece-together some of the events of his life during those times when he would disappear.

One day we found out that Rene, Sam’s mother, had been diagnosed with Huntington Chorea.  Huntington’s is a hereditary, degenerative brain disorder for which there is no treatment or cure.  Huntington’s slowly diminishes a person’s ability to walk, think, talk, and reason.  Eventually, the person becomes bedridden and totally dependent on others for his/her care.   When her family could no longer take care of her, Rene was placed in a run-down retirement home in the south end of town.  Rene still lives there, but tragically has gone so far downhill that she’s only a few small steps from becoming just like Teri Schiavo.

Early the next spring Sam showed up at my parents’ house, asking for work.  They gave him some jobs around our pear orchard, and Sam took a saddle and some leather telephone-pole climbers to his house to refurbish.  My dad even bought a used snow-plow from him for eight hundred dollars. Sam never gave Dad all the parts to make it work, and always had a story about why he couldn’t give Dad the additional parts.  Sam always promised he would bring them the next time he came.

As for the saddle and climbers, they weren’t really worth any money, but they had a lot of sentimental value, especially to my mom. The saddle was from a family friend who had left it to my mother in his will. The leather climbers (for telephone poles) had been given to my mom after her brother died in an electrical accident. My dad had let Sam take them, and he was supposed to make some minor repairs and grease the leather, but he never brought them back.  After months of lies, he finally told us that he had lost them.  How could he lose, sell, or give them away, when he knew how meaningful they were?  We were all very furious; I think Sam felt guilty, and he stopped coming around anymore.  Once in a while I’d run into his father, who would ask if I’d seen Sam, then he’d tell me he didn’t know where he was.

About two years later, I was helping at a middle school counseling program, teaching kids how to improve both their relationships and their lives. Part of the program was to teach the students how to forgive those people who had “wronged” them.  I remember feeling sentimental that day, and wrote Sam a letter explaining how I forgave him, and that I hoped we could mend fences.  A couple of weeks later, Sam started coming around the house again. We played badminton and basketball with the kids, watched movies, and had a good time re-connecting. In fact, he came to our house every night for over a week.  Sam cried, as he told me that he’d been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, and his brother and sister had also.  He was really scared. He had been fired after getting into a wreck in his work truck, and couldn’t keep a job.  We starting to notice problems with his memory, and his behavior became even odder.  Then, as you can probably guess, Sam disappeared again.

13 responses to “My friend has disappeared, part 1”

  1. LP says:

    Welcome, Marleyfan! This is a riveting post — and sad, of course. Looking forward to reading more, though I fear it comes to no good end… Thanks for posting.

  2. Brooke Maury says:

    Marleyfan! Good stuff, can’t wait to read more. When is the next installment? And I <3 the new design, Dave! Very well done.

  3. Rachel says:

    Marleyfan, this is simply wonderful, and so heartbreaking. In this age of being able to log onto Facebook and know what your grade school nemesis is doing at this very moment, or to reunite over coffee with a long-lost buddy, it’s amazing how often we still lose poeple, and lose them again and again. Thanks for this. My heart goes out to Sam, and to you.

  4. julie says:

    Can’t wait for part 2! Nice debut! I also love finding out that you are a fan of your cat Marley and not Bob. Oh wait maybe you are a super fan of Bob and named your cat after him…I’m confused. This post made me reflect on that time of life where you are still young enough to let people into your life so much that they come live with you…You did a nice job in bringing us into this world.

  5. PB says:

    This is so interesting – Woody Guthrie had Huntington Chorea, as did his mother. in the biography “A Life” by Joe Klein, he describes Woody’s behavior and it sounds so strangely familiar to Sam. Your story moves with equal parts sympathy and frustration – trying to understand someone who seems a few different people at once. Can’t wait for future posts.

  6. Dave says:

    Marleyfan, I love all the little details about your friend, remembered after all these years.

  7. Scotty says:

    I’ve had several friends with mental and emotional problems. The hardest part can be how deeply one needs to dig for empathy.

    After reading your post, I have to say that I don’t really get where the love you obviously feel for Sam come from. Does it have something to do with growing up in a small town or as part of the LDS community?

  8. Gary Lee Smith says:

    An excellent narrative. I can not wait to read more.

  9. Jane says:

    What a wonderfully honest and heartbreaking story. I’m glad you posted, and I can’t wait to read more from you. Thanks.

  10. Tim says:

    Marleyfan! Thanks so much for this awesome post. Can’t wait for Part 2.

    It reminded me of this post by Rachel. Come to think of it, we never did get Part 2 of that one. Heavy hint!

  11. Marleyfan says:

    Thank you all for the nice comments, glad you liked it. I didn’t really know how difficult writing was, until I started writing this post. And I’d be embarassed if you really knew how much time went into not making it sound like I was trying too hard. My son helped alot with his editorial strenghts; it is an interesting twist to life to ask your child for help… Hopefully Part 2 will get a little easier, I’m working on it now.

    5. Usually Huntington’s doesn’t move as quickly as it did with Sam. I’ll have to read-up on Woodie.
    7. I think I’ve always been naturally drawn to the under-dog. And, Sam was easy going, and fun (and had MTV), and I’m a little more on the serious and contemplative side, so the friendship just worked, and I overlooked his faults.

  12. AW says:

    Hurray, Marleyfan, for this wonderful but sad post. Thanks for writing and sharing.

  13. Hey Marleyfan,

    I really, really love this piece. I’ve had a couple of Sam-like friends, and this really touched me. Sometimes we just find ourselves loving people in spite of our best interests. The heart is a funny thing.